On Wednesday, Google introduced a new beta capability within its Gemini app, enabling the AI assistant to craft more personalized responses by drawing connections across your Google services, beginning with Gmail, Photos, Search, and YouTube history. While Gemini previously had access to information from these apps, it can now intelligently reason across your data to deliver proactive insights—like linking an email conversation to a video you recently watched. According to Google, this allows Gemini to grasp context without needing explicit instructions on where to find relevant information.

This beta feature, named Personal Intelligence, is disabled by default. Users have full control over whether and when to link their Google apps with Gemini, acknowledging that not everyone is comfortable with AI analyzing personal content like photos or viewing history. If you choose to enable it, Google states that Gemini will only activate Personal Intelligence when it identifies a clear opportunity to be helpful.

In a blog post, Josh Woodward, Vice President of the Gemini app, Google Labs, and AI Studio, explained, “Personal Intelligence has two core strengths: reasoning across complex sources and retrieving specific details from, say, an email or photo to answer your question. It often combines these, working across text, photos and video to provide uniquely tailored answers.”

Woodward illustrated this with a personal example: while waiting at a tire shop, he couldn’t recall his car’s tire size. While many AI assistants can look up standard tire sizes, Gemini offered a personalized recommendation for all-weather tires after recognizing family road trip images in his Google Photos. It also retrieved his license plate number from a stored photo when he had forgotten it.

He added, “I’ve also been getting excellent tips for books, shows, clothes and travel. Just this week, it’s been exceptional for planning our upcoming spring break. By analyzing our family’s interests and past trips in Gmail and Photos, it skipped the tourist traps. Instead, it suggested an overnight train journey and specific board games we could play along the way.”

Google has implemented safeguards for sensitive topics, ensuring Gemini avoids making proactive assumptions about private data such as health information. However, the assistant will discuss such topics if explicitly asked. Importantly, Gemini does not directly train on the contents of your Gmail or Photos library. Training occurs only on specific prompts entered into Gemini and the model’s corresponding responses—personal data like trip photos or emails is referenced solely to generate a reply, not to train the underlying AI.

Personal Intelligence is initially available to Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the United States, with plans to extend access to more countries and to Gemini’s free tier in the future. Google has shared example prompts to try, such as: “Help me plan my weekend in [city i.e. New York] based on things I like to do,” “Recommend some documentaries based on what I’ve been curious about,” or “Based on my delivery and grocery receipts in Gmail, Search history, and YouTube watch history, recommend 5 YouTube channels that match my cooking style or meal prep vibe.”